Relationships and relationship networks, the web of personal and professional relationships that connect individuals, are important drivers of business processes such as selling, marketing and hiring. For example, sales executives rely heavily on their relationship networks to gain access to prospects and buyers, and hiring managers and corporate recruiters depend on their relationship networks to find qualified candidates.
An enterprise typically uses one or more Enterprise Relationship Management (“ERM”) software applications to allow employees to manage personal and professional relationships and information. Messaging software applications (“messaging”) typically provide comprehensive automation packages for contact management, note and information sharing, calendaring, email, instant messaging, to-do lists, etc. One example of a messaging application is Outlook sold by MICROSOFT CORPORATION® as part of its Office suite of applications. Other communications systems and software (“Communications”) found in the enterprise include instant messaging applications, as well as telephone and Voice over IP (“VoIP”) applications.
In addition to ERM, Messaging and Communications applications, enterprises typically employ other software applications to manage relationships both inside and outside the enterprise. For example, Customer Relationship Management (“CRM”) software helps a company manage existing and developing customer relationships in an efficient and organized manner, Sales Force Automation (“SFA”) software increases a sales team's efficiency and effectiveness by automating, organizing and tracking the sales process, Partner Relationship Management (“PRM”) software facilitates and automates the sales processes across distributors and external sales channels, and Employee Relationship Management (“eRM”) improves the management of internal employees. Other applications to assist the enterprise in organizing and managing the workflow of different business processes and automating the presentation of information to users are well know to those of skill in the art.
For clarity, the above-described applications are collectively referred to herein as “enterprise applications.” Enterprise applications store information that may be used to deduce the existence of a relationship or the strength of a relationship. This information, and the relationships and relationship networks that this information describes, is generally referred to herein as “relationship capital”.
The relationships and relationship networks in enterprise software, however, can be difficult to access in an efficient manner. These relationships are often documented, but the relationship capital that identifies these relationships is often distributed across many disparate enterprise applications, with data that is often redundant, outdated or incomplete. Furthermore, the relationships and relationship capital are often not weighted, fail to indicate the strength of a given relationship or piece of relationship capital and do not dynamically adjust weights in response to changing data and events. Some employees, such as sales persons and other executives may also be reluctant to share relationship capital that they own, such as information regarding their personal relationships, with other employees or outside parties without retaining any control with regard to how these parties use the relationship capital. Finally, the relationship capital and relationships identified thereby are rarely aggregated, analyzed, and integrated into a relationship network that describes the full breadth of interconnections between individuals and enterprises.
These issues and concerns generally limit the amount of relationship capital that is made available and accessible through enterprise software, which negatively impacts the efficiency and productivity of an organization. Thus, business processes that the organization conducts using enterprise software, such as selling, marketing, hiring, etc., can be ineffective, uncoordinated or inefficient.
Accordingly, there is a need for systems and methods that provide integrated, correlated, current, complete and dynamic information regarding the relationship networks of employees and companies. There is a further need to extend and enhance enterprise software to encourage users to share relationship capital that they own, as well as provide users with control over the particular relationship capital that they make available to other members of the enterprise. In order to overcome shortcomings and problems associated with enterprise software, the present invention provides systems and methods for Relationship Capital Management (“RCM”) to facilitate and leverage relationship capital throughout and between enterprises.